Alastair Burnet

Sir Alastair Burnet, journalist, broadcaster and editor of The Economist from 1965-74, died on July 20th, aged 84

FEW editors of The Economist have been famous faces. Alastair Burnet was an exception. Even before he took up his post in 1965, he had gained a degree of fame as a political reporter on television. He continued to broadcast during his ten years as editor, and indeed long after, becoming most celebrated as the face and voice of ITN’s “News at Ten”, the first, highly successful, half-hour newscast on British television. Later he was a commentator whose calm, even tones, with a slightly amused and Scottish edge, were in demand for national events. When he stopped, in 1991, he had guided viewers through a series of general elections, demystified a couple of royal weddings and a moon landing (“There it is, the old Moon—the one the cow jumped over”) and presented the news several thousand times.

Although he sometimes worked for the BBC, he preferred the more lowbrow independent television. He was interested, he said, in presenting news that the “plain folk” would talk about the next day. So perhaps it was no surprise that the most obvious way in which he changed The Economist was to make its appearance less austere, its headlines and captions more chatty and its style more punchy.

Some considered this commercial, and they were partly right: the circulation rose by 60% during Alastair’s tenure, to 123,000 in 1974. A few considered it vulgar, and thought it reflected a lack of seriousness on the part of the editor. They were reinforced in this view by Alastair’s jocular banter, his easy resort to mimicry and his habit of taking the Monday morning editorial meeting with a gin and tonic in his hand. Worse, he commissioned regular articles on golf, and had an undisguised interest in football (this was before every intellectual affected a fascination for Aston Villa) and an even greater love for the turf. To his evident pleasure, The Economist bought a racehorse, which once appeared, beribboned in its owner’s colours, at the foot of the new skyscraper in St James’s Street that by then housed the newspaper. Anyone expecting of this Scot a high-minded, humourless Puritan would have been surprised.

And also deceived. Alastair was a confident public performer but fundamentally a shy man, often ill-at-ease with others, especially women. The banter and facetiae were devices to keep at an amiable arm’s length anyone not in his close coterie. Those who considered him lightweight misjudged him. He had turned down his second-class history degree from Oxford because, in his opinion, he deserved a first. Only occasionally did he show his learning—as when he was heard on air to describe as “very Voltairean” a politician who spoke of going off to do some gardening—but he was a fluent writer, well read, well informed, numerate and immensely hard-working.

He was also principled. He was loyal to his staff, quite ready to defend them before an overbearing chairman. Never was he grasping. He refused a golden, or perhaps silver, handshake after 18 not-very-successful months editing the middle-market Daily Express, to which he had inexplicably gone after The Economist.

The cross of Vietnam

His economic views were less pronounced than his political ones, possibly explaining why he was the first editor of The Economist to appoint an economics editor. In politics his sympathies were with Conservatism, albeit of a leftish sort. This put him firmly behind the forlorn attempts of Edward Heath’s government to reform Britain’s trade unions. He also readily supported Britain’s entry into the European common market, which he saw as posing no threat to an even more important attachment, the Atlantic alliance.

That attachment was surely deepened by, if not born of, Alastair’s year in America as a Commonwealth Fund Fellow in 1956-57. Whether, but for this, the most controversial policy of his editorship—the paper’s enduring support for the Vietnam war—would have been any different cannot be known. Most of the leaders on this subject were written by the foreign editor, Brian Beedham, but Alastair never seemed unhappy with their line.

He also trenchantly defended immigration. When, in 1968, the Labour government decided to deny Asians in east Africa who had British passports the right to settle in the United Kingdom, he ran a cover portraying a British passport lying among rubbish beneath the words, “If that’s what it’s worth”. When, in 1972, Uganda’s Asians were expelled, he put on the cover a picture of an airport arrivals door with a sign reading, “Welcome, British Passport Holders”. The use of covers to make a telling editorial point may have been his most lasting legacy at The Economist.

Alastair was not of analytical bent, nor was his mind notably original; he was impelled above all by the news and a desire to present it well. Appointed to the editorship at the age of 37, he could easily have had a second career in business or politics, but eschewed them for a very public role in journalism that somehow showed little of his character. Utterly unassuming, he listed his home address and telephone number in “Who’s Who” and, at the height of his televisual renown, spent each morning answering the cascade of letters brought by every post. Despite such openness, his was a very private public face.